Mother Daughter Me (24 page)

One morning over breakfast in the hotel dining room, Zoë wants to tell me something. “You know, Mom,” she says, “sometimes I hate telling people my dad is dead. Like when the passport guy asked us that.”

“I know,” I say.

Then she adds, “So sometimes I pretend he’s alive. Like when I meet people I know I won’t see again. Like Eric the ski instructor. Yesterday we were on the chairlift and he asked me what my dad does, and I said, ‘He works at UC Berkeley.’ ”

This gets my attention. Just thirty-six hours ago I was applauding her ability to face loss head-on.

“Why do you think you do that?” I ask her.

“It’s just so much easier,” she says. “I hate how people react when I say it.”

This saddens me. But as I look around at all the nuclear families in the restaurant, I can see why she would feel self-conscious. Kids her age don’t want to stand out from the crowd in any way. What teenager would want to be “the kid with the dead dad”?

As I ponder this, I notice that many of the children in these families are on their best restaurant behavior. I find myself wondering about what Zoë might have learned from me. Not life lessons but practical skills, manners, and customs. So I ask her whether I’ve taught her anything.

“What do you mean?” she asks.

“I mean the stuff mothers are supposed to teach their daughters. Basic stuff you need to know.”

“Of course you have,” she says.

I ask her for specifics and she shrugs. “I don’t know. Just stuff. Like putting your napkin in your lap and chewing with your mouth closed.”

When I think about it, the only concrete everyday task I can remember my mother having taught me was how to tie my shoes. But she didn’t teach me how to stitch a hem without having the thread show on the outside. She didn’t teach me what I know about cooking bacon—that it will sneak up on you, that just when you think it needs another minute,
it’s done. And she certainly didn’t teach me to put my napkin in my lap. But who did?

WHILE ZOË IS OFF
skiing, I send Sarah an email. Since getting back in touch, I’ve been asking her for some basic facts about our childhood. Today, among other things, I ask her what we learned from our mother. Ten minutes later, I get a lengthy response. To the question about life skills, she tells me my mother could make a hamburger and open canned vegetables, feed us and sit us back down in front of the TV set. Sarah has more to say—so much, in fact, that the subject line of her email is “It’s all very shocking so sit down.” I’m not sure if I’m ready to absorb all of this.

Her email is an elaborately detailed account of the day our grandfather removed us from San Diego, and the events leading up to it. At first I skip like a virtual rock over the pond of words, alighting on a few phrases here and there: “the place was almost uninhabitable” and “in bed drunk for a week.”

Then I focus. Sarah’s memory, it turns out, is much clearer than mine. Once we had determined how much my mother had ingested in the way of hard liquor (“close to a quarter of a bottle”) and barbiturates (“a handful of pheno”), Sarah called our grandparents. My mother was enraged at Sarah for busting her to her parents.

Next, Sarah writes something that is difficult to read, and even more difficult to ingest. Just as I blamed myself because of my broken leg, Sarah had always thought
she
was the cause of that messy, pill-laden binge. Sarah was twelve and had just gotten her first period. And that made our thirty-six-year-old, achingly beautiful mother feel old, and threatened by the blooming of her daughter, her replacement. Sarah has always believed that, for a variety of reasons, my mother blamed her two children for her misery: the responsibility we burdened her with, and the lack of freedom we represented. We were her jailers.

Sarah had a far keener understanding of the impact of our mother’s alcoholism than I did, no doubt because she took more of the brunt of it. This twelve-year-old girl had suffered a forty-five-year-old’s quota of disappointment and had “finally just had it.” It was Sarah who could
say, point-blank, that our mother had been in bed drunk for a week, that the apartment was a filthy mess. (As I look back on it, I realize it was probably at that moment that Sarah gave up once and for all on being a child; her “I’d finally just had it” was a more general resignation.) Sarah minced no words. She got it, and she always had, in a way I hadn’t.

I close my computer and go for a walk.

Later that day, when I return to the computer and open my email, there are more messages from Sarah, and I’m relieved to see that she has moved on to her favorite subject: gifts for each other. Would I like her to send me a pair of pewter earrings? Yes, I say, that sounds very nice. Sarah also has a few more ideas for Zoë: Would she like a charm bracelet? Another season of
Weeds
?

Before we leave Whistler, I ask Bob if he’ll pick Zoë and me up at the San Francisco airport. He’s happy to do it, but an airport pickup, he informs me, crosses a significant line in a relationship, implying true boyfriend/girlfriend status. The freighted meaning of an airport pickup is a nugget he got from a
Seinfeld
episode, he explains, and I’m amused. Given that he has invited me to meet his parents for the surprise birthday celebration for his father, it seems to me we crossed that line a while back.

———

B
OB, ZOË, BOB’S YOUNGER SON BENJY, AND I ARE INVITED TO DINNER
at the home of David and Matt, the couple who set Bob and me up, and I’ve decided to bake a cake for the occasion—a thank-you for the uncommonly successful matchmaking. But when the morning of the dinner arrives, I’m distressed at the thought of leaving my mother behind, of telling her we’re off to dinner, having her ask where, then having to explain it’s a family dinner to which she isn’t invited.

Even with an inner voice nagging at me—this can’t turn out well—I send an email to David asking if I might include my mother, and he responds immediately: “Yes, do.” When I ask her if she’d like to join us, she says she’d be delighted.

Shortly afterward, Zoë and I set off to shop at our favorite Safeway. Just as we’re pulling in to the parking lot, Zoë asks me who will be at the dinner. I go down the list and tack my mother on at the end, ever so casually, hoping to slip this past her. No such luck.

“If she’s there, I’ll feel terrible.” At first I think Zoë is angry, which,
in part, she is. But there’s a more complicated set of emotions here: sadness, disappointment, frustration.

“Terrible about what?” I ask.

“About everything. She just makes me feel terrible about everything.”

Zoë says she won’t go, she’d rather go to a basketball game at school. She and my mother are so at odds that she has legitimate cause for anger. Then she adds: “And I’m sure Bob would agree with me.”

By now we’re in the grocery store and I call Bob.

When I tell him Zoë is angry with me for inviting my mother, he’s quiet. “You’re in a difficult position,” he says. For a fleeting moment I think he’s going to be sympathetic. He is, but he’s also ticked off. He hasn’t been drawn to my mother over the past few months. He describes the vibe he gets from her as “cold” and “judgmental.” He is disinclined by nature to fawn, and the bits and pieces he’s heard about my childhood have made him wary of her. She picks up on it, and all of this adds to the tension between them.

“Having your mother there will alter the dynamic,” he says. “You need to understand that what you do isn’t neutral for everyone else. It has an effect on others.” I’m coming to recognize Bob as a man who knows how to keep a cool head and offer reasoned assessments, an ability I’m both unaccustomed to and grateful for. He does this now without a trace of rancor, but his sentiment is clear.

I’m in the produce section, paying so little attention to the shopping that I’m randomly piling vegetables into the cart—pounds of broccoli and loose carrots. At that instant, it dawns on me that I’ve invited my mother to a dinner celebrating a relationship of which she disapproves. And there’s no question Bob is right—her presence will alter the vibe, and not for the better. I close my eyes and let out a small moan. If Zoë doesn’t go, Bob says, Benjy probably won’t go either. I’ve wandered into the dairy section and forgotten why I’m here. I’m so absorbed in the conversation that I’m bumping into other grocery carts with my own. People are glaring at me; I’ve become a parody of an annoying person on a cellphone. I tell Bob I’ll disinvite my mother. He says he’s sorry that I have to do that, but it’s the right thing to do, and we hang up.

On the checkout line, I tell Zoë I’m going to go home and tell my mother she can’t come after all.

“Now I feel bad that you have to do this,” she says, but when she hears that Bob has taken her side, she’s vindicated. “I told you he would agree with me.” The moment is painful, but after the Scott fiasco, I do like the fact that Bob and Zoë often find themselves as a team, even if it is a team pushing back against my decisions. “So when you talk to her, please don’t lay this all on me.”

When we get home, I hear my mother practicing on the piano downstairs. I go directly to see her and do exactly what Zoë asked me not to do. Sitting on the couch next to the piano, I stammer out something about the tension between her and Zoë and that it might not be a good idea for her to come tonight after all. But I simply can’t bring myself to mention that Bob felt just as strongly, if not more so.

My mother says she understands, that she’ll go to Trader Joe’s to buy herself some dinner. But as I sit there, I see her mouth grow tight. An hour later, I’m in the kitchen making the cake and my mother returns from the store. As she puts her food away, she’s banging things around, mumbling—quite audibly—something about how much trouble it is to fit everything into her one drawer in the refrigerator. She’s furious.

“I can tell you’ve been stewing about this,” I say, calling out the obvious.

“You would be stewing about it too,” she says, then pauses before coming out with what she really wants to say. “The worst part is that you felt like you
could
do this.”

“Mom, you’re making me feel awful.”

“Yes,” she says. “And you should.”

She’s right, of course. In my attempt to anger no one, I’ve managed to anger everyone.

My mother isn’t finished. “I can understand that there’s something about me that Zoë doesn’t like, but it seems that my very existence is a problem for her.”

Now her anger at me is buzzing around the kitchen like a trapped housefly; it quickly lands on something in the corner of the room. I follow her eyes and see she’s looking at the garbage can, which, I notice,
I’ve done a pretty sloppy job of lining. White plastic is poking out everywhere. My mother picks up the garbage can, carries it over to where I stand, deposits it next to me on the floor, and directs all her fury and frustration at this singular domestic failing. “Have you learned
nothing
from your expensive cleaning lady?” With that she snaps the bag into place, returns the can to its corner, and storms downstairs. I’m left speechless.

When we return from dinner that night, having had a wonderful evening, free of tension, the house is quiet, the lights are out, and I assume—I hope—my mother is asleep. As I lie in bed, the incident still churns in my mind. Why do I continue to try to create harmony between my daughter and mother, and now between my mother and Bob? Why do I keep making the same mistake?

With fatigue, oddly enough, comes clarity. Sure, part of it is my ceaseless—and by now clearly futile—desire to write a fairy-tale ending to this mother–daughter–granddaughter parable. But there’s something more at play. It was the
man
thing again. I still want her approval. I’ve wanted her to view Bob as a prize because I want her to think I excel in the arena that matters most to her. I’m still stuck in that car at age seven, with my mother and grandmother appraising my figure—and my future.

———

B
OB’S SATURDAY HAS TOO MANY MOVING PARTS. HE NEEDS SOMEWHERE
to park Smokey, his dog, for the afternoon. I offer to take the dog and to make dinner for Bob and Benjy that night. Bob is grateful for the help, and he and Smokey arrive a few hours later; he unpacks the bowls, leash, and squeaky toy while my mother and I watch. We hear a pronounced click-click-click against the hardwood floors as Smokey, a high-strung smooth-haired collie, paces from room to room, assessing the place with his nose.

“Smokey’s nails are too long,” says my mother.

Bob looks irritated. “Feel free to cut them,” he says.

“And there’s an appendectomy that needs performing in the other room?” my mother says.

Bob looks at her quizzically.

“Cutting a dog’s nails isn’t easy,” my mother continues, in a tone that lets us know she thinks Bob has no idea what he’s talking about.

When Bob leaves, Zoë and I go off to shop for dinner, and no sooner do we enter the store than I see I have a voice mail from my mother. Uh-oh. “Smokey took a huge pee right in the middle of the rug in my piano room.” She is not happy. She wants me to get some Nature’s Miracle, which creates an enzymatic reaction that magically neutralizes the odor. She’s going on at some length about the science behind the product, but I cut off the message and call her back.

“I’m so sorry,” I say.

Her tone is grim. “He made a beeline for my rug as soon as he heard the front door close. Then there was a loud sound, like a garden hose. And there he was, peeing all over my rug.”